Obama Looses the Manhunters: Charisma and the Imperial Presidency

A boy carries his belongings next to the rubble of his home, which was destroyed in a US airstrike in the villiage of Azizabad in the Shindand district of Herat Province, Afghanistan. (Photo: Fraidoon Pooyaa / AP)

Let's face it, even Bo is photogenic, charismatic. He's a camera
hound. And as for Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia - keep in mind that
we're now in a first name culture - they all glow on screen.

Before a camera they can do no wrong. And the president himself, well, if you
didn't watch his speech in Cairo, you should have.
The guy's impressive. Truly. He can speak to multiple audiences - Arabs, Jews, Muslims,
Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans - and somehow just about
everyone comes away hearing something they like, feeling he's somehow on their
side. And it doesn't even feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness.
It feels like intelligence.

For all I know - and the test of this is still a long, treacherous way off
- Barack Obama may turn out to be the best pure politician we've seen since
at least Ronald Reagan, if not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He seems to have Roosevelt's
same unreadable ability to listen and make you believe he's with you (no matter
what he's actually going to do), which is a skill not to be whistled at.

Right now, he and his people are picking off the last Republican moderates
via a little party-switching and some well-crafted appointments, and so driving
that party and its conservative base absolutely nuts, if not into extreme southern isolation. In this sense, his
first Supreme Court pick was little short of a political stroke of brilliance,
whatever she turns out to do on the bench. Whether the opposition "wins"
(which they won't) or loses in any attempt to block her nomination, they stand
to further alienate a key voting bloc, Hispanics. Now 9% of voters, Hispanics went for
Obama in the last election by a staggering 35-point margin. Next time their
heft might even bring solidly red-state Texas closer to in-play status in the
two-party system. In other words, the president has left his opponents in a
situation where they can't win for losing.

Mix Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan ...

All this is little short of amazing, particularly if put into even the most
modest historical context.

If, in a Star-Trekkian mode - hand me the "red matter," Mr. Spock!
- you could transport yourself back to early 2003 and tell just about any American
what's coming, you might have found yourself institutionalized. If you had said
that the new norm would be a black president with Reagan-like popularity, Kennedy-like
charisma, and Roosevelt-like skills in the political arena, leading a majority
Democratic Congress in search of universal health care, solutions to global
warming, energy conservation, and bullet trains, your listener might, at best,
have responded with his or her own joke: "A priest, a rabbi, and a penguin
walk into a bar ..."

After all, back then, before two "hurricanes" - the invasion
of Iraq and Katrina - began the process of turning our American world upside
down, the Bush administration seemed to be riding ever higher globally and the
Republican Party even higher than that at home. Back then, the neocons were
consumed with imperial dreams of shock-and-awe-style
eternal global conquest and domination ("Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want
to go to Tehran"); and the President's "brain," Karl Rove, now
exiled to the opinion pages of the Wall Street
Journal, was convinced that he was nailing down a domestic Pax
Republicana for generations to come.

And at that moment, who would have denied that things would turn out just that
way? So don't let anyone tell you that history doesn't have its surprises. A
black guy with the middle name of "Hussein," a liberal Chicago politician
from - in a phrase Republicans then regularly spit out, as if saying "Democratic"
was too much effort - the "Democrat Party"? I don't think so.

And yet, in mid-June 2009, less than five months into the Obama presidency,
can you even remember that era before the dawn of time when people were wondering
what it would be like for an African-American family to inhabit the White House?
Would American voters allow it? Could Americans take it?

You betcha!

Being President

All that said, let's not forget reality. Barack Obama did not win an election
to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA, or the Ford Foundation.
He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States
which means that he is head honcho for the globe's single great garrison state
which now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future
war.

He is
today the proprietor
of - to speak only of the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese
border that the Bush loyalists used to call "the Greater Middle East"
- American bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material (or all
of the above) at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United
Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan,
Pakistan (where the U.S. military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities),
and a major Air Force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island
of Diego Garcia.

Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary, but others
like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are gigantic installations
in a web of embedded bases. According to an expert on the subject,
Chalmers Johnson, the Pentagon's most recent official count of U.S. "sites"
(i.e. bases) abroad is 761, but that does not include "espionage bases,
those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous
facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon
for its own reasons chooses to exclude - e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan."

In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the
largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad
by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command
center. It now houses what are politely referred to as 1,000 "diplomats."
Recent news reports indicate that such a project wasn't just an aberration of
the Bush era. Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house "a large military
and intelligence contingent," will be constructed by the Obama administration
in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are
added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dollar embassy. Each of these
command centers will, assumedly, anchor the American presence in the Greater
Middle East.

Barack Obama is also now the commander-in-chief of 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, which regularly patrol
the planet's sea lanes. He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that's
what our intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least 16 squabbling,
overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other's throats. They have a
cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so obsessively
consumed by the very idea of "intelligence" that it is willing to
support 16 sizeable separate outfits doing such work, and that's not even counting
various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities.)

The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up almost half the world's total military
expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget will be marginally higher than
the last staggering one from the Bush years at $664 billion. (The real figure, once
military funds stowed away in places like the Department of Energy are included,
is actually significantly larger.)

He now inhabits a Washington in which deep-thinking consists of a pundit like
Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whining that these bloated sums are,
in fact, too little to "maintain" U.S. forces (a budgetary increase
of 7-8% per year for the next decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in
which forward-looking means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting military
spending toward preparations for fighting one, two, many
Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box, futuristic thinking means letting
the blue-skies crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
loose on far-out problems like how to turn "programmable matter" into
future Transformer-like weapons of war.

As for foreign policy, had the November election results been reversed, Obama's
top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. National
Security Advisor James Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates someone he admired, and Hillary
Clinton a figure he could well have picked for a top post after a narrow election
victory, had he decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama's key
foreign policy figures and advisors are traditional players in the national
security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking
globally in familiar ways.

General Manhunter

And let's be careful not to put all of this in the passive voice either when
it comes to the new president. In both of these areas, he may have felt somewhat
unsure of himself and so slotted in the old guard around him as a kind of political
protection. Nonetheless, this hasn't just happened to him. He didn't just inherit
the presidency. He went for it. And he isn't just sitting atop it. He's actively
using it. He's wielding power. In foreign policy terms, he's settling in - and
despite his Cairo speech and various hints of change on subjects like relations
with Iran, in largely predictable ways.

He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy when it comes to transparency
in government, but in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial
avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death.
He's just appointed a general, Stanley A. McChrystal,
as his Afghan commander. From 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations
outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention
of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis
as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who
remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds
of enemies were assassinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents,
and Sadrists (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and
turn over their own personal enemies as well).

Although he's now being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal
in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and "protect" the Afghan population
in the bargain), his actual field is "counter-terrorism." He spoke
the right words to Congress during his recent
confirmation hearings, but pay no attention.

The team he's now assembling in Washington to lead his operations in Afghanistan
(and someday maybe Pakistan) tells you what you really need to know. It's filled
with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is,
above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News,
an extra 1,000 special operations troops are now being "quietly" dispatched
to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind
that it's been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door
night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents
of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan 21,000
troops and advisors (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian
diplomats and advisors, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to
be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article,
has "been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates,
including many Special Operations veterans ... [He] is assembling a corps of
400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan
for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat
is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an
approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge
of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this figure - the Spartans, after all,
only needed 300
warriors at Thermopylae - tells us a great deal about the top-heavy
manner in which the planet's super-garrison state fights its wars.

So, this is now truly Obama's war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the
dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president's men an ever bloodier
secret campaign of so-called counter-terror (though it's essence is likely to
be terror, pure and simple), as befits an imperial power trying to hang on to
the Eastern reaches of the Greater Middle East.

The new crew aren't counterinsurgency warriors, but - a term that has only
recently entered our press - "manhunters." And don't forget,
President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which "manhunters"
engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground
but, thanks to the CIA's escalating program of targeted assassination
by robot
aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and an orgy of
manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era version of "counterinsurgency"
dissolved as well.

Into the Charnel House of History

A neologism coined for the expanding Afghan war has recently come into widespread
use: Af-Pak (for Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater of Operations). But the coining
of neologisms shouldn't just be left to those in Washington, so let me suggest
one that hints at one possible new world over which our newest president may
unexpectedly preside: Ir-Af-Pak. Let it stand, conveniently, for the Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan
Theater of Operations - a neologism that catches the perilously expansionist
and devolutionary possibilities of our moment.

Media organizations in increasingly tight financial straits sense the explosive
nature of this expansionist moment and, even as they are fleeing Iraq (and former
bureaus in so many other places), like the president, they are doubling down
and piling into Afghanistan and Pakistan. But don't count Iraq pacified yet.
It remains an uneasy, dangerous, explosive place as, in fact, does the Greater
Middle East. Worse yet, the Af-Pak War may not itself be done expanding. It
could still, for instance, seep into one or more of the Central Asian 'stans,
among other places, and already has made it into catastrophic Somalia, while
a shaky Yemen could be swept into the grim festivities.

Finally, let's return to that "dream team" being put together by
Obama's man in Afghanistan. That team of Spartans, according to the New
York Times, is being formed with, minimally, a three-year horizon.
This in itself is striking. After all, the Afghan War started in November 2001.
So when the shortest possible Afghan tour of duty of the 400 is over, it will
have been going on for more than 10 years - and no one dares to predict
that, three years from now, the war will actually be at an end.

Looked at another way, the figure cited should probably not be one decade,
but three. After all, our Afghan adventure began in 1980, when,
in the jihad against the Soviets, we were supporting some of the very same fundamentalist figures now
allied with the Taliban and fighting us in Afghanistan - just as, once upon
a time, we looked positively upon the Taliban; just as, once, we looked positively
upon Saddam Hussein, who was for a while seen as our potential bulwark in the
Middle East against the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran. (Remarkably
enough, only Iran has, until this moment, retained its position as our regional
enemy over these decades.)

What a record, then, of blood and war, of great power politics and imperial
hubris, of support for the heinous (including various fundamentalist groups
and grim, authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes who remain our allies to this
day). What a tale of imperial power frittered away and treasure squandered.
Truly, Rudyard Kipling would have been able to do something with this.

As for me, I find myself in awe of these decades of folly. Thirty years in
Afghanistan, it staggers the imagination. What tricks does that land play with
the minds of imperial Great-Gamers? Maybe it has something to do with those
poppies. Who knows? I'm no Kipling, but I am aware that this sorry tale has
taken up almost half of my lifetime with no end in sight.

In the meantime, our new president has loosed the manhunters. His
manhunters. This is where charisma disappears into the charnel house of history.
Watch out.

Note
for readers: Credit where credit's due: the neologism, "Ir-Af-Pak,"
is actually the invention of Jonathan Schell. A small bow of appreciation to
him for handing it off to me and another bow to Jim Peck for some inspired suggestions.
Thanks as well to Alfred McCoy for helping to bring me
up to speed on the meaning of General McChrystal's Iraq activities. In addition,
the filmmaker Robert Greenwald's website Rethink Afghanistan (also the name of
his new film) is starting to post clips about Afghan casualties of the U.S.
air war. These will be incorporated into part four of his Afghan War
film, being released part by part on-line. Because we see so little of this,
these initial clips are sobering and well worth viewing. To do so, click here,
here,
and here.